“This is not a work of art!” –Marcel Broodthaers.
patrick di rito | September 12th, 2010Atlanta’s Beltline from 10th Street south to North Avenue NE.
Patrick Di Rito
[1] Is art in Atlanta dead? Was it ever alive? Is art the key towards gentrification? Is gentrification even a desirable thing? What is gentrification? Who owns public space? I set out to answer none and all of these questions. With no guarantees to find answers, thus begins an experiment, an adventure, an anabasis in search of art, art communities and artists within the confines of Atlanta.
[2] “Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum. Art settles into stupendous inertia. Silence supplies the dominant chord. Bright colors conceal the abyss that holds the museum together. Every solid is a bit of clogged air or space. Things flatten and fade. The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that immobilize the eye.” -Robert Smithson, Some Void Thoughts on Museums. 1987.
[3] Emerging Properties. Property values are increasing along the peripheries of the beltline in anticipation of the projects impeding completion. First to move in: the recently homeless. They beat out the young professionals eager to gentrify the situation. They set up their putrid snares. The pools of water and sea of pilfered shopping carts were calculated to preclude excessive observation or interaction with the designated areas. The collective, as they identify themselves, are now free and unrestricted in their movements. They lie in wait.
[4] Biomimcry. The pile of ashes is all that remains of the last lightning storm. The bottle was selected by the doctor as an ideal candidate. The suffusion of green across its rounded dimensional surface mimicked exactly the distinct hue of green as the chlorophyll injected photosynthetic cells of the proximate region. The newly spawning flora infused with the synthetic particles of its host appears to be in a stable growth pattern. We can only wait and see.
[5] Insulating experience. I have no idea where I am contextually to the city of Atlanta. I realized once I set off that I would have no way of knowing when I reached North Avenue [my sense of direction being sufficiently poor to elicit two printouts of Google maps: one for the way there and one for the way back]. I was however sporadically provided a reassuring glimpse of the Bank of America buildings. Being one of the top 100 buildings in the United States, I was sufficiently confident that if all else were to fail that I could make it back to this beacon and back to campus.
[6] Vestiges of a past history. The railroad ties stripped from the ground, unearthed from their natural habitation lay out in a putrid heap. They have been stripped of their former glory and now lay in naked waiting for the funeral pyres. A group of bikers passes them disdainfully. There could be no symbiotic relationship with the entitled white collar young professional exploring the highly regulated confines of the beltline. Their inconvenience must be eliminated. Death to the infidel.
[7] High walls of green insulate you from the industrial nature of the site. Oblivious to the plight beyond we proceed in our perpetuating philistinism. It is an urban oasis. Personal contact with nature is quite unlike the highly constrained and manipulated conditions of Piedmont Park. The minimalistic human intervention provides the framework of authenticity.
[8] “Charlie Smith – Transformational Transportation.
Symbolizing the forward thinking progress of transportation for the city of Atlanta, the sculptures serve as markers, tunnels and checkpoints for the human entity in the new BeltLine corridor.” –Atlanta Beltline Website.
A curious surprise to say the least. I was fortunate enough to meet Charlie Smith in his studio over the summer at the Print Big exhibition. His aptly named fire sculptures provide an interesting dialectic between nature and art. The raw materiality of the corten steel allows for the entropic and aleatory moves of nature to interact harmoniously and intentionally to elicit the juxtaposition of constraint and chance. It was going so well until evereman intervened. The ever-present evereman.
[9] “Claudia Rebola Winegarden and Ali Mazalek – Sonoscope
An outdoor, interactive sonic play-space for a multi-generational audience. Solar-powered and equipped with motion sensors, visitors can create performances from their own movements and generated sounds all housed within multi-faceted abstract arches.” –Atlanta Beltline Website.
With eight pictures to go [in a series of miscalculations I had forgotten my third memory card and additionally forgotten to empty the remaining two cards] I stumbled upon the abandoned vestiges of a project I had seen before. The contextual shift; however, had been less than forgiving to the installation. The rampant and wild nature along the peripheries was determined to exact its revenge on the manipulations and perversions of the engineered wood. Its shield of polyurethane was insufficient to counteract the aggressive assaults by the environment. “We mortals are but shadows and dust.” –Proximo. Gladiators.
[10] Footscapes. The aura of the underfoot. The materiality of the perpetual ground plane. The crude path established by a linear projection of gravel was sporadically interjected with asphalt of the ever present surface parking or the art installation. It is a path for the feet. It is a path in diametric opposition to the feet. The ground is conflicted.
“This is a work of art.” –Marcel Duchamp.
[ art, atlanta, city, community, Installation, v_02 | i_01 ]
thanks for using just as much imagery as words. good title.
museums are indeed tombs, although tombs are not altogether undesirable places. . .one might consider a museum to be a very expensive library (for high end objects made from outside the mainstream culture). . .more and more we understand museums to be a space for the general public. marketing focuses heavily on “new audiences,” in order to meet gigantic overheads. architecture programs wax on idealistically. . .but alas, the bigger the crowds, a museum’s most valuable property fades–its spaciousness which gives room for independent contemplation. these are precious commodities, indeed.
as far as the beltline goes. . .let’s not forget its goal of providing public transportation. it is a place for general audiences. . .and the less commercial that space surrounding this transportation system, the better. the art along the beltline was underwhelming, but it did provide a reason for more people to get out there and walk it, claim it as a commons, fall in love with it’s green wildness. so that when the malls and subdivisions come, we can protest.
a very interesting point about the potential desirability of museums as tombs. there is the idea of a personal intimacy and quietness around graveyards that mimics the idea of a locale around which art should be displayed.
over the summer i was fortunate enough to visit enric miralles’ igualada cemetery and myself and shota were the only two people to make the pilgrimage to the site that day. it was a very profound and contemplative silence that allowed us to really engage and meditate on the architecture and about life and death itself.
however, the quote is speaking of another aspect of the tomb. the death part. the artwork becomes the objects to be buried, all life to be removed. the viewer then becomes a mourning patron, lamenting the life and energy that the work of art once allowed for.
but going back to the cemetery and the idea of nature infusing a museum, the quiet simplicity of the beltline allows for the exact type of meditative thinking provoked at the igulada cementary. i found however, that the number of art works was not necessarily insufficient, but rather the quality. i was unable to appreciate most of the pieces along the beltline, because some began to quickly move into the realm of kitch and arts and craft. [a note: arts and crafts is not art. it is perhaps the one and only example of non-art that i can think of.] charlie smith’s fire sculptures were a breath of fresh air and perhaps the only piece that i was truly able to appreciate. even more graffiti art would have been an pleasantly evocative work of art.
does the beltline have to become a commercial avenue? yes probably so. but i would hope that the creators and designers would experience the condition as it exists today and take note of the phenomenological and experiential qualities of the space right now.
Patrick, if i understand you correctly, you are trying to equate art to gentrification. Are you trying to correlate the two in that art comes in and helps gentrify? By writing, ‘Is art the key towards gentrification? Is gentrification even a desirable thing?’ do you mean that we all pre-suppose that gentrification is a good thing?
To me, gentrification implies economic eviction of lower-class residents, many of whose families historically were cornered into those very residences by the implementation of redlining- until the power brokers, and the “middle class” want to return. And when they do, gentrification occurs. Is it a good thing? The rich and middle class say yes, because they are making a place “better.” The people without voices cry “no!”
If a gentrified human being makes a noise (namely a loud NO) and nobody is around to hear her, does she still make a noise?
What this article touches on is that fact that we are all so concerned with art, that we forget the social mission of architecture.
As for myself, i am less concerned with the ground being conflicted, and more concerned with what that means to the people interacting with it.
Thank you for shedding light on some assumptions that were not fully addressed and for de-contextualizing the notion of gentrification. When I speak of gentrification, i refer to the most minimalistic idea of gentrification, that being the increase of the average income of a particular region. This definition does not assume any of the negative connotations that gentrification today carries and begs into question why when the average income of a particular region increases it could not be the residents who already live there that are doing better than before. Perhaps a new industry opened up and provided better jobs for the citizens.
However, perhaps i am being particularly naive about the subject of gentrification. perhaps it is an intrinsically deleterious effect to the lower socio-economic classes. Perhaps the we who suppose its benefits only are in the upper or middle classes.
But is it possible to entertain the thought of a densification, where upper or middle classes actually intermingle with the lower classes and create a community of diverse socio-economic classes? Is such an idea possible to conceive of? Probably no. But it is the reality we are all faced with, whether we would address it or not.
There will always be the lower classes who cling to regions of wealth in an attempt to gain some kind of economic or monetary sustenance. The city will intrinsically be populated by poor and homeless. Are we to follow Los Angeles’ example and explicitly segregate the upper and lower classes to the point where it is actually illegal for homeless people to pass certain thresholds of wealth?
What are more successfully precedents for dealing with the homeless? I believe Germany has a law where squatters can eventually own the property if they live there long enough. That would provide an inherent incentive for the homeless to be able to construct their own makeshift shelters.
So a question in return, Does gentrification have to have an intrinsically negative overtone? And is gentrification then an inevitable evil that will pervade through developers and the upper classes? I would like to think no to both of those. Is it too far of an idealist perspective?